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Bogdan Rusu, 39, a Romanian national living in Howard Beach, Queens will serve the sentence handed down in U.S. District Court in Newark concurrently with a 65-month sentence given to him last June by a federal judge in Massachusetts.
Rusu struck plea deals with the government in exchange for leniency in both cases. He'll have to serve the entire terms because there's no parole in the federal prison system.
Rusu admitted in federal court in Newark last February that he and his ring used secret card-reading devices and pinhole cameras to capture bank account information and personal data from 4,350 customers at various New Jersey and New York bank ATMs – mostly Bank of America and PNC Bank branches.
Crew members then created bogus cards with the stolen information and siphoned nearly $400,000 from their victims, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito said.
Rusu – who’s been in federal custody since his November 2016 arrest -- also pleaded guilty to similar bank fraud and identity theft charges in U.S. District Court in Springfield, MA in 2018.
Federal authorities there said the ring stole $364,419 in Massachusetts and $75,715 in New York (totaling $440,134 from 531 individual accounts),
Rusu and his accomplices “captured payment card account information from customers as they accessed their accounts through automatic teller machines and then used that information to steal money from the customers’ bank accounts,” Carpenito said.
As part of the scheme, the ring members “installed devises on ATMs in New Jersey and elsewhere to illegally obtain customer account information, including account numbers and personal identification numbers,” Carpenito said.
“Rusu and others would then transfer the illegally obtained information to counterfeit payment cards and use those counterfeit cards to steal money from the accounts,” he added.
Eleven other defendants charged in the scheme have pleaded guilty.
Carpenito and Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski credited special agents of the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); special agents of the U.S. Secret Service Boston Field Office; Massachusetts State Police and police in Cambridge, Medford and Ludlow, Massachusetts with the investigation leading to Tuesday’s sentencing.
In addition to the prison term, U.S. District Judge Esther Salas sentenced Rusu on Tuesday to three years of supervised release and restitution of $390,141.
Handing the case for the government are Assistant U.S. Attorney Angelica Sinopole of Carpenito’s Organized Crime and Gangs Unit in Newark and Trial Attorney Marianne Shelvey of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division Organized Crime and Gang Section.
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